Authors' Teaching Tips Focus on Reading and Writing: Advanced Robert Cohen Unit 1: My Time in a Bottle A good way to study father-son relationships (and the theme of addiction) and to appreciate Mickey Mantle's portrait of his father is to have the class read Frank McCourtís portrait of his father in Angel's Ashes (Scribner, 1996). The passage I use starts with "I know when Dad does the bad thing" and ends with:          I think my father is like the Holy Trinity with three people in him, the one in the morning with the paper, the one at night with the stories and the prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland.          I feel sad over the bad thing but I canít back away from him because the one in the morning is my real father and if I were in America I could say, I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you canít say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You're allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head (pp. 208-210). The students compare the two portraits of the fathers before writing a portrait of their own. (The last paragraph cited here also "connects" well with the material in Unit 5, What Is Lost in Translation?) Having the class read Emily Cerf's short story "Everest," before or after working on the Mantle-McCourt comparison, also helps the students to discuss their insights regarding father-son relationships. Judy L. Miller Unit 9:The Cellist of Sarajevo I start the unit with a discussion of the picture on page 205 and a listening activity: Scott Simon in an interview with Vedran Smailovich, the cellist of Sarajevo (National Public Radio: "All Things Considered"—Weekend Edition with Scott Simon). The interview focuses on the destruction of the Central Library of Sarajevo and the value of culture. Scott Simon suggests that some listeners might think it is foolish to mourn for books when so many people have died:          In a war which has killed more than 200,000 Bosnians, it may seem unfeeling to grow tragic over the loss of what are after all themes. But the 300,000 or so books which burned here, books in Serbo-Croat, English, French, and Russian, the paintings and tapestries, the maps and documents, the Muslim, Serb, Croat, Bosnian, Christian and Jewish histories, philosophies, commentaries, and novels, all of that which was demolished here is also a kind of ethnic cleansing, a massacre of memory, an annihilation of civilization. The discussion generated by this listening activity prepares the class well for Reading One, "The Cellist of Sarajevo." My students have also enjoyed "linking" Readings One and Two ("The Soloist") by creating "thematic" interviews between individuals of their choice from the two readings: for example, Mark Salzman's cellist asking Yo-Yo Ma how he felt when he played David Wilde's composition entitled "The Cellist of Sarajevo"; Paul Sullivan asking Vedran Smailovich why he came to Manchester to hear Yo-Yo Ma play "The Cellist of Sarajevo"; Mark Salzman's cellist asking residents of a nursing home in Maine what music means to them, etc. This "reading comprehension" activity prepares the students for all kinds of creative writing assignments.